Friday, 8 November 2013

Recent Patching (7th and 8th November)

The past two days on patch have been fairly decent and I've made a couple visits down to Swanpool, Swanvale and the neighbouring coastline in the early morning before lectures and late afternoon. I've only managed to squeeze in a couple daylight hours either side of lectures but Thursday's visit was still relatively eventful as I located 5 Mediterranean Gulls in Swanpool car park, including my personal highlight a 1st winter bird with a green colour ring on it's right tarsus and the standard metal BTO ring on the other. However, I was rather disappointing that I couldn't read the number as I am keen to see if the influxs that occur here are boosted by numbers from the continent. Moving on, I finally managed to locate my first 2 Great Northern Diver of the winter close inshore at Pennance Point (a winter and adult sum plum bird). 2 Water Rail at Swanvale and some Chiffchaffs also pushed the day up a notch.

After lectures, I headed back down to the coast, this time with Matt, and whilst scanning the bay, Matt suddenly picked up on a small pod of dolphins moving through the bay! Sure enough, we were treated to great views totaling 7 Bottlenose Dophins! The pod of three eventually moved around to Gylly where we encountered a the second pod of four all performing brilliantly with one individual even swimming on it's back and jostling the others in its group. They truly are a social animal. 2 Great Northern Divers were also in Falmouth Bay.

Today started out rather damp and drizzly as I made my way down to Pennance Point for some sea-watching. It was uncomfortable to say the least to sit on the slippery wet rocks at the edge of the cliff but viewing conditions were as close to perfect as they would get for finding cetaceans. Sadly no dolphins this time but 2 Harbour Porpoises made up for this. I also logged a total of 4 Great Northern Divers in the bay, 2 Mediterranean Gulls and a flypast Peregrine.